Business

Closing time

Longtime jeweler looks back, forward

Price Jewelers owner Tim Price stands outside the store, which he owned for nearly 50 years before closing it this month. (Paul Albani-Burgio/Fort Morgan Times)

In some towns, they'll say a name is "as good as gold." But in Fort Morgan, the Price name is synonymous with it.

So it has been for nearly 100 years. But no longer. That's because earlier this month, Price Jewelers owner Time Price retired from business and closed the store that has been a mainstay of downtown since his grandfather opened its first iteration on Main Street in 1919.

"I feel great because I think I've done all I can do," Price said about closing the store. "Business in Fort Morgan is not like it used to be. No one shops anymore."

According to Price, the ease and popularity of shopping online had made a brick and mortar jewelry store an increasingly difficult proposition.

"No one in my family wants it and I really don't want them to," Price said. "It's a good, clean business but it's not a good business for a young person in this age."

So Price closed the store on June 1 and shuttered a family legacy that began when his grandfather, Alfred H. Price, opened his first jewelry business in Nederland, then a booming mining town.

"He had his store in a tent because he didn't have a building," Price said. "He bought gold dust and gold from the miners and repaired watches, which was a very sacred thing in those days, as well as jewelry and assayed some stuff for the miners. He was open 24 hours a day because they didn't have a bank and that was the only way they could watch their wares was to stay open all the time."

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After five years in Nederland, H. Price, a native of Ada, Kan., returned to the plains to open a jewelry store on the south end of Main Street in Fort Morgan. He ran that store until his death in 1938 when it was taken over by his wife, Maude.

H. Price's son, Horace, took over the store in 1946 and ran it for twenty years before selling it. But the new owner had no jewelry experience and the store floundered. Tim Price, who had recently returned to Fort Morgan from Maryland where he moved at age 24, finally bought the store out of bankruptcy in 1968.

"I had never had a desire to ever be a jeweler," Price said. "I wanted to be a trainer of race horses and that's what I did for 15 years before I ever got to be in the jewelry business."

By that time, the store was located at 327 Main next to the Fort Morgan Times after having moved six different times up and down Main Street. It moved into that space from one next to the Cover Theatre after being destroyed by a fire that started at and also ruined the theatre. The kiln oven from the bakery that had previously occupied 327 Main remained in the back of the store and attracted "rats as big cats" from the alley, Price said.

When Times owner Bob Spencer bought the store's building in 1971 to expand the newspaper's offices, Price moved the store to its final location around the corner at 106 Beaver. Price said Fort Morgan has changed considerably in the 45 years since and now bears little resemblance to the town he remembers from his youth.

"The class of living in Fort Morgan has dropped considerably," Price said. "It has also graduated to a place where it is more or less a retirement town, which is another reason it's hard to have a business here because all the retirees already have everything they ever need."

Now that he is retired, Price says he is looking forward to "doing anything I want." He says he plans to do a little fishing and hunting, which are hobbies he inherited from Alfred and Horace. He also hopes to attend horse races around the country, particularly at Saratoga Race Course in New York and Arlington Park in Illinois, which he says are two of his favorite tracks. Price first became interested in horse racing during his childhood in Fort Morgan when he would go to the now-defunct Brush Memorial Park racetrack to walk horses with friends as a child.

Though Price Jewelers closure will undoubtedly be felt by many in the community, Price said closing it hasn't made him sad.

"It really didn't," he said. "I started with an empty store and now I walked out of an empty store. It's kind of the same as when I started so it didn't bother me a bit in that regard. You would think it would but it didn't."

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